It's not Bill Gates anymore. It's Steve Ballmer. I think the EU is too scared to bite MS because they're afraid of Ballmer's amazing chair-chucking powers.
That's interesting. When I dual-booted, I was on Linux 100% and Windows 0%. I booted Windows 3 times to fix filesystem errors on the NTFS partition (I didn't know how the fsck command worked back then) and then after 3 months I killed Windows 'cause I hadn't used it. Been using Kubuntu ever since. Okay, so I tried Gentoo, then Fedora, and now I'm back on Kubuntu. I just found that OpenOffice did everything I needed. I use GMail, so that goes with me everywhere.
In addition, the skills I've learned using Linux have allowed me to use my hosting company's services with greater effect. It's so enabling to be able to log in via SSH and make a post-commit script to slap the latest documentation onto the web directory for every new build. The Windows "easy equivalent" involves Visual Source Safe (sticker price $500 or so, per seat) and IIS 6.0 (which is a much more expensive server, almost $200/month for the same kind of bandwidth/storage I get now under a Linux VPS) and a FTP client and the "copy paste" technique AFTER locating the latest build in the gigantic and cryptic VSS repository (which is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, what with all the files named things like AAAAAAAAAAAB.AAAAAAAAAAA and crap).
What's more, I've never paid a single penny for Linux. I've tried the free trial of SuSE SLED 10.1 and it's NOT the solution for the future (trust me...) however, Linux itself is. Moving to Linux with either Ubuntu/Kubuntu is the easiest thing there is, and it will save you a lot of money. It will also save you a lot of time. My VSS vs. Subversion example is only one recent event. I have had many kinds of similar experiences with Linux.
The only reason for not upgrading to Linux is fear of the painful times when you're thunking around in between Windows and Linux. It's like jumping into the pool: it's really painful up to the gonads, but after that acclimation it's all smooth-sailing.
That's precisely what free will is all about. God is giving you the chance to screw yourself, only he won't sneer and say "I told you so." when you're at the pearly gates and your name's not on the list.
Religion is addicting: if you get deep enough into it and exercise a little faith, there's always an answer for everything.
Face it: you're fighting an establishment several thousand years older than you. Defeating you in a theological debate would be like sandblasting a sodacracker. I'm not saying I'm qualified to do so, but a competent scriptorian could. I'm no modal Christian (hello! I read/.) but go find youself a CS Lewis and debate with him.
You've obviously never used PHP. I can code something quick and dirty in Java in no time. But I'll spend twice the time, twice the effort, and twice the thought for the web based crap because:
You've got to plug it into HTML. A pain.
You've got to secure it. If you're not paranoid about your PHP scripting, a script kiddie WILL hack you and WILL rape your network.
Who said anything about a war of guns and missiles?
I'm talking about an ideological war. It destroys the intullectual peace to just have the dang war, and it rapes the peace to leave the terrorism there. Their terrorism is Islamic Fascists - trying to make the rest of the world convert to Islam. It's in their Fatwas. They're committed to FORCING their way of thinking upon others. They've already waged war against my way of thinking. Whether I recognize it or not, there is a war. Will I fight for what I beleive?
It's fine to have differing opinions, but when they become destructive it is a crime against humanity.
Or you could read a few pages out of the gigantic book "upgrading and repairing pc's" and build your own machine.
That's what I did. My machine works just fine.
PS: Your sig is sort of dumb.
if(terror==peace)
GenericHuman.this=null;
else { }// do nothing
Excuse my Java, but your thinking is a bit flawed IMHO.
I'll stop if you'll agree to stop. Agreed. You didn't stop. You continued arguing the point. Your silence would show that you agree. I'll give you another chance by not replying to your counterarguments. However don't make the grave mistake of thinking I've nothing left to say - if you have a change of heart, my opinions and I will be here waiting.
Now, for some reason you seem to believe that The original idea is sound, it just needs some more tweaking to make it work. I strongly disagree that people who behave in a slightly antisocial way deserve to be tortured to death, along with their families. Nothing about the original idea is sound. It's suggesting a horrible regression of society in order to combat a trivial inconvenience to all but the terminally stupid. (I also don't think it was a serious suggestion, so a non-serious reply is entirely expected.) Tweak more. You might actually get to what I mean.
A satirical, euphemistic response is feedback. It tells the person making the suggestion that they are hopeless underinformed on the issue. They can get all pissy about the fact that a serious discussion about a complicated issue actually requires that you have some idea of what you're talking about, or they can realise that they've made a naive suggestion (likely without bothering to check if anyone else has already done so) and go and learn more about the issues. Wow. "This does not torture them enough" isn't constructive criticism, and really contradicts what you said before. I didn't think I needed to differentiate between good and bad feedback for you. You're a piece of work.
Yes, it is criticism: but it's constructive criticism (unless your ego is too large to be able to view it as such). I would also point out that many more people see these responses than just the original poster. If sending a quick form in response prevents even 2 or 3 other people from sending in their similarly flawed, over-simplistic "solutions", then it's actually saved the list members some time. They don't need to read the additional suggestions in the first place, and nobody has to spend time composing a nice polite email explaining basic things to them. So, if I'm reading this correctly: "I don't have time to explain it to them, therefore it's not worth explaining to them."
Just because you don't have time does not mean that others do not.
Lastly, you also admit that combating the spam problem through legislative means requires the cooperation of essentially every nation on the planet. Given the number of vastly more pressing issues which also require cooperation but have failed to obtain it, any suggestion that spam will be the issue that consolidates the world's governments and dictators is utterly absurd. There already exist international crime fighting organizations. INTERPOL is one of them. Here's an idea for you: nations that fail to uphold their end of the bargain should be totally disconnected from the Internet. Let them spam themselves to death, but it's inherently unacceptable that I have to pay because it's illegal for people to prosecute some botnet in China just because of a border which doesn't exist in cyberspace. The geographical barriers which exist on the map aren't there on the net, and the law has to reflect that.
So basically my stance is this: this entire discussion is absurd! I've been silently thinking the same thing, though I thought it impolite to voice the matter. If you're done having me lecture you on kindergarten morals and ethics, I'll stop if you'll agree to stop.
The people who get the canned response are themselves being counter-productive. They haven't bothered to read the list archives or do any of their own research on the subject, or they would already know that their suggestion is useless. These sorts of minds are not a useful resource to apply to the problem.
You know that in mailing lists it's generally considered rude if you speak when you have nothing to say? So you personally don't have the patience to explain to some newbie about the problem. Rather than maintaining silence and letting someone else help the person, you egotistically rebuke them. Honestly, it takes you more time to criticize them than it does to ignore it.
Another way of learning more about something is making a suggestion and listening to feedback. Satirical, euphemistic feedback does not help.
I don't know where you got the impression that I'm unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. My original response in this thread was an (apparently misguided) effort to convince you that a humourous canned response is entirely appropriate for messages like the one which started the thread ("just make it legal to kill spammers and their families!"), and that doing so isn't in any way being a "part of the problem."
I (and many others) would be quite willing to hear about new methods for combatting spam. You may be correct in saying I'm anarchistically unwilling to hear completely impractical and unworkable "solutions" which just cause more problems and don't do anything to actually address the issue.
I'm a programmer. You don't get far in programming that learning that your initial idea is nothing more than a starting point. True, the page is no longer blank, but you do have an eraser with which to make changes and modify the original idea. Your policy of just rejecting/ridiculing incepient solutions is counterproductive. The toughest problems only get closer to being solved the more times you approach them, and you're flat out refusing to come back and take another whack at it.
More specifically, the Law does not install locks on doors to prevent theft, but provides punishments that deter potential theifs from comitting the crime. What you're saying is that you're unwilling to make a more effective law, and rather are only interested in building a better lock (a technical solution to spam, like a filter system). We need both.
I for one would much rather have 95% of my email time wasted by spam than to be mugged even 0.01% of the time. They're not even close to being on the same scale.
I agree with you there. However, seeing as how we have the mugging problem mostly under control, let's focus on the spam problem. They share the same abstract root. They simply manifest themselves differently.
But not all that effective. Ignoring the ethical and practical problems of the death penalty (false positives, anyone?), statistics have shown time and again that the threat of capital punishment doesn't reduce the rate of serious crimes by a significant amount compared to the threat of imprisonment. People commit crimes like these because either they're emotionally or mentally unstable, or because they believe they won't be caught.
You're missing the point. Those people you listed (the ones that are insane or think they won't get caught) are going to commit the crime no matter what law you have in place. It's the people that calcuate the risks of getting caught (ie. the cautious ones) that are more likely to commit the crime if there is a weak punishment. You can't do anything about the crazy people, but the strong punishment drives away the others. I wonder how many spammers keep spamming away because they know that the worst that will happen to them is a mere slap on the wrist. This would suggest two actions:
1) Stronger laws that punishes more severly the crime
2) Development of new ways to catch people commiting the crime
One without the other is totally worthless. The OP suggested
Don't squash the armchair philosopher himself (as you advocate), rather, squash his pride. Then he'll be able to help the problem. Unti then, you're not helping anyone other than your own self-gratification in ridiculing those you consider inferior to yourself.
Remember: never hurt the newbie, because they are the ones that will be the next master.
That people have created a system of ridiculing people searching for a solution tells me that we're getting further from a solution. It also makes me begin to suspect that the people making/using that list are spammers attempting to stomp all attempts to find a solution.
The response is mostly designed for cases where people see the same old "solutions" propose time and again by technically illiterate folk who think that they've found a simple and easy solution that all the experts have somehow missed. It converts something repetitive and tedious into something that's at least a little bit amusing.
Or in other words: the people that made that list are actively involved in trying to find ways to fight spam, and use it to stomp useless suggestions (which have all been suggested before) which either do nothing to address the problem or are completely impractical.
The would you mind helping these people? Simply ridiculing them is alienating a mind that is willing to work on the problem. It's extremely counter-productive.
Spam is a crime. It wastes other people's time and money. It's petty theft. It's no better than walking up to someone and mugging them.
I see your point! Surely if we can prevent people from mugging other people, we can prevent people from spamming others as well! Oh, wait... we can't even protect the physical safety of people from others who live in the same society and under the same code of laws as them.
Surely even you are aware of the statistics. Somewhere around 95% of all email sent is spam. Now, even in San Francisco you don't get mugged 95% of the time you walk out your door. Similarly, I don't think that 95% of my [email] time should be stolen.
You have a perfectly valid point, though it doesn't stand the test of statistics. If spam were floating at somewhere around 40% or even 50%, you'd have a much more valid argument.
We need to either find a way of tracking them or find a way of screening them out. I'm open to solutions. I've spent considerable thought on the problem, and I don't have any ideas short of blacklisting (which isn't feasible.)
That's because it's a complex problem with no simple solution, just like many of the other problems we're currently unable to solve. You aware that many, many people are trying to find ways to eliminate or at least reduce the problem? And many of these people seem to be a good deal more intelligent than you, but haven't come up with a silver bullet.
It's unrealistic for you to expect me, or anyone, to have a solution. However, you're being anarchistically unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you're trying to be part of the problem.
But the internet's been doing a pretty good job so far at surviving.
I would beg to differ.
Your link contains a message from someone who's mail service was being overwhelmed by spam connections, and he improved his system so it's able to automatically block (at the network level) the major problems. It actually sounds like this problem resulted in him increasing the efficiency of his mail system.
Hardly a good example of spam "breaking the internet", or a demonstration that the internet isn't surviving.
Finally: the humorous canned response was a reply to someone who suggested we make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their families. It's nice that you're so serious about wanting to stop spam, but I don't think anyone expected a serious reply to that proposal.
Fear is an effective tool of management. If we used the death sentence more often, do you think crime would be comitted as often? To me it's a preventative measure. However, the only flaw I can find in that planis the tracking down the spammers part. They're devious and careful. They're hackers. They know how to imp
> Perhaps the makers of this list would care to put their clearly superior intellect towards solving the problem, rather than making fun of people who try to solve the problem?
Whoosh. I even said it was satire in the very post you responded to. That people have created a system of ridiculing people searching for a solution tells me that we're getting further from a solution. It also makes me begin to suspect that the people making/using that list are spammers attempting to stomp all attempts to find a solution.
I don't find it satirical as much as I find it BS. Slightly amusing BS, but it's not welcome AFAIC.
I want a solution, not excuses. Spam is a crime. It wastes other people's time and money. It's petty theft. It's no better than walking up to someone and mugging them. You're doing the same thing, anyways. They're loosing money paying (either directly or indirectly, either in their time or in the time of the people they either directly or indirectly employ) and time wasted in the totally bogus unsolicited spam.
More and more of the spam I see (I'll read one or two every week or so just so I know more or less what I'm talking about) is a gigantic con. Phishing. It's nothing but miserable people who have nothing to offer society leeching off of society by preying on those that aren't looking out for the predators. It's low. It's horrible. It should be highly punishable.
That doesn't help. We need to either find a way of tracking them or find a way of screening them out. I'm open to solutions. I've spent considerable thought on the problem, and I don't have any ideas short of blacklisting (which isn't feasible.)
If SPAM breaks the internet, SPAM will die.
My brain fairly vibrates with the impact of such tremendous insight. But the internet's been doing a pretty good job so far at surviving. I would beg to differ. http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/2006-Decembe r/053992.html
There are other stories on the same list. I don't feel obligated to teach/show/do-for-you how to mangle a URL to find the proper page to navigate through.
Perhaps the makers of this list would care to put their clearly superior intellect towards solving the problem, rather than making fun of people who try to solve the problem?
The best SPAM solution I've heard yet is rebuilding the whole email system from the ground up, integrating new message sender authenitcation techniques. However, this is rejected because it breaks existing systems which rely on automatically sent email. In addition, the system would be too easily abused (who decides what's legitimate email?).
SPAM I think will eventually collapse upon itself. It's currently saturating the internet, making normal, legitimate traffic wait. I recently noticed that a fellow member of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group finally tweaked his email server enough to recieve something other than spam. He said he got about 3 months of backlogged legit email.
If SPAM breaks the internet, SPAM will die. They have to find a limit at some point, and they also need to find a way to make money. I can't find anyone that says they've actually bought anything from spammers. Rather, I'm led to believe that they make almost all their money off of phishing. It's therefore my supposition that they keep up these massive bot nets and mass-spam tactics to keep us distracted from their real cash source: phishing. Remember: they don't necessarily need to get your credit card number. They can make a pretty penny simply selling your personal information (email, address, phone number, whatever) to other spammers. The phishing and PIM-harvesting is their big ticket item. I'm willing to speculate that there aren't any drugs in Canada. It's all a distraction.
What about the issue of maintainability and quality assurance in software? When they admit defeat and put the final nail in the Coffin of Visual Source Safe,.NET, and other "standardized" faux pas, I'll open back up to their "innovation." So far they've only wasted my time with unstable OSes, erratic software, and inherently broken tools that I should be able to rely on. I started using Linux because it was *no longer an option* to continue using Windows.
I was using Windows XP Professional, the one that was supposed to be the most stable, the most secure, and the most usable. What did it do? It locked me out of my laptop. It drove the poor processor into the ground with useless processes running day and night. It drove that little processor further towards critical failure when it's insecurity allowed vicious spyware, adware, and other things to run on my laptop. I had to wait 2 years for the release of MS Anti-Spyware to rip out all that spyware. Where was Microsoft's "innovation" then? I'm a safe user, too! I use Firefox, and I don't go to any bad websites, I don't read spam email or open any unknown attachments, and I still got blasted with enough spyware to curse my first email address with enough spam to force my evacuation to a gmail account.
I have to reinstall Windows on my desktop machine once every 4 months or so to keep a stable platform. How come whenever I click on my network card in the network connections area of control panel the system does nothing? It did that in XP Pro, too. Is this an undocumented MS "innovation?"
When I removed an old hard drive, the OS decided it needed to reactivate Windows. I've had to reinstall the dang thing so many times that it decided I had a pirated copy, and LOCKED my activation key. A $35 support phone call later gets me a new key which will work once. When Windows commits suicide in another 3 months, I'll have to call MS again, pay another $35 and get another key for the same machine. Is this a "innovation?"
When I associated my.NET passport with my GMail account, it took a full six hours before my GMail account went from 10 spam a month to 10 spam a minute. I'm not joking. My GMail account only started getting spam once Microsoft knew it was there. I'm assuming that this is another "innovation."
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but they can hire all the Ph.Ds in the world, and all the interns, too, but they're still far from being "innovative."
Take Vista, for example.
When I beta tested it, every time you did something that wasn't built for Vista, it spent 15 seconds disabling the Areo-glass theme and reverting to the 2D interface. When I exited, it spent about 30 seconds turning the 3D effects back on. I'm just going to assume that's an "innovation." Even if it is, I have to point out that my Fedora Core 6 laptop has the whole 3D desktop effect without any of those drawbacks right now. SuSE had Xgl in full release about six months before Vista (assuming it is still released in Jan. of '07). Also, Apple has had the whole 3D desktop thing going on since about 2001 with OS X. Forgive me for not finding MS very "innovative."
I suppose their greatest "innovation" was putting macro scripting into MS Office. That way you could write a malicious script which worked on Windows *and* OS X. That's innovative.
I suppose someone might have a solution to all these problems. However, the bulk of these problems happened in 2003, 2004, and early 2005. They're history. MS has irrevocably lost my trust. After the spam thing, I just don't know what else they could do. The only things they have left to do is murder my family, destroy my home, impugn my country, and preclude my hopes and dreams. At least they can't take my honor. Or maybe a new "innovation" will change that, too?
Umm... saying that M$ has the best IDE is like saying that they have the best way to skin a cat. There is no such thing as a "best" IDE. The qualifier for "best" IDE is a opinion. I like Eclipse for Java, KDevelop for C++, and I can't find anything to like about VS because I don't like manually searching through MSDN for 50 minutes out of every hour. I also find VS's indentation engine to be inherently broken for all I want out of it. For all it does, I think that Dev C++ is better. Does this mean Dev C++ is better than VS? No. It means I FIND it better. VS is not a one-stop-fixes-all IDE, and you talk like someone who's never used anything other than VS. I've personally tried Eclipse, Anjuta, KDevelop, NetBeans, Borland's JBuilder and C++Builder, VS C/C++/C#, Quanta+, Bluefish, Dreamweaver, Dev C++, and a handful of others that I can't think of off the top of my head. All this experience has taught me that it's a matter of preference. Shame on you for saying anything different.
M$ probably released the specs on the now document file they use because it isn't meant to be secretive. If you look carefully at it, it's really just a zip folder with some files in it. It's got a directory for images, and, IIRC, it has a metadata file and some other bit and pieces. It wouldn't be that hard to reverse-engineer it. The primary difficulty would be upgrading the renderer on the non-M$ veiwer to successfully view the document. It's got a lot of 3D effects and transparency/reflection effects in Office 2007. MS is probably hoping that no one will bother to make their renderer good enough to display those effects, which would persuade most users to keep Office 2007. It is clever, you have to give them that.
While I'm sure there are many other resources out there, I'm referring to the fact that Wikipedia in unique in that it is the single most centralized free resource of information. I remember to the days before Wikipedia, when the world was full of Yahoo! searches (Google was in its infancy) and how the net was composed of a few sparse resources which weren't very good. That was 1996-1999. Then Google came onto my radar and that made things easier. Then Wikipedia came and the net became a very usable thing. While the net would still be technically "usable" in the absence of Wikipedia, Wikipedia has created a expectation that would be sorely, sorely missed. The analogy is fairly accurate if you start to postulate the ramifications of depreciating the role of Wikipedia in your life. Try boycotting it for a week (a week in which you would have needed it) and see how you fare.
I love that there is so much stuff on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia at the library doesn't have hardly any of the things that people will need these days. Case study: I got called "leet." I had no idea what it meant, and the person wasn't doing a terribly bang-up job of explaining it. I wasn't sure whether to sue him for libel or to be deeply complimented. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out. Marvelous.
Wikipedia also has many valuable tidbits of information. Example: They have a wonderful article on Binary Trees, and more wonderful articles on how the Internet works, how the IP system came to be and how it works, and all kinds of stuff. You just don't find that stuff in the same level of detail in the Encyclopedia Americana. It's a wonderful public resource in that it opens up more information, more up-to-date information, and so much much more of it to *everyone.* You don't have to be able to get to a library if you just have a internet connection and a computer.
If Wikipedia ever went down, it would be like Google going down. The web would become almost unusable, and likewise the web would loose a terribly important resource in Wikipedia. Wikipedia also is so accurate that many other online encyclopedic services use Wiki articles as theirs or they use them as a base to build their own articles. I saw the same Wikipedia article on King Leopold the Third of Belgium mirrored on about nine different sites (only about three of which admitted that it was a Wikipedia article, curiously enough).
This isn't *software* they're patenting. This is like Random House Publishing patenting the Sentence. It's not legitimate. A doubly linked list is one of the most generic, abstract tools of programming. No patent, law, or principle could make me stop using them. They should be sued right now for this blunder. Hey, Microsoft, you've got lawyers, money, and time to blow... why don't you put them in their place?
Exactly. MS has patented the double-click, did you know that?
1) That's a idiotic patent. It's too ambiguious. If they patented the mouse, then they'd have some beef. However, then:
1.1) They'd have to sue people like Targus, Logitech, Saitek, Dell, Comp USA, and everyone else for making mice, which apparently infringe on MS IP.
1.2) We'd all switch to IBM's TrackPoint or a trackball, or a track pad, hell, or even use touch screens.
1.3) They can't do that. So, even if the court doesn't overturn that bogus patent, what do we do? Replace "double-click" with "dual-click" or "click twice." No big deal. Otherwise they'd be patenting the ability of MY finger to apply pressure to an object. I think God would have a few issues with MS infringing on His IP at that point. 2) I'm willing to bet that most of the MS patents are stupid things like that. 3) About the IP stack thing...
3.1) The IP stack was done before DOS, before Microsoft. Before Linux, even. It would be impossible to prove that the IP stack is a MS invention, because it isn't. If you want proof, go read Wikipedia. They've compiled an excellent history of the Internet and the IP protocol.
3.2) Stuff like HTTP, Telnet, etc. has been around as long as well.
3.3) With all this patent nonsense, this would probably trigger a movement to change the dates of software patenting. After 3 or four years the patents nullify and the technology passes into public domain. That's enough time for a company to make a profit off of a technology, no? If they didn't, it must have *really* sucked. 4) In order to prove that any code in any OSS is infringing on MS IP, MS would have to disclose their sources to the world for a candid comparison. MS isn't going to do that. They've jealously guarded their sources for years. I know from a friend that they have full-time hackers who's job is to maliciously destroy people who try to steal the code (they fried his computer somehow - he was using Windows, big surprise). 5) If MS wants to review the Linux code, we could just fax all the code over the Redmond... 6) I think it's infinitely more likely that MS blatantly stole and steals Open Source, GPL-ified material on a regular basis. How easy would it be for them? It's all open source, sitting out there in the open for them to ctrl+c and ctrl+v... Their sources will never be seen outside the company, so there's no way for them to get caught. All they have to do is mangle the binaries a bit so they're not comparable to the OS origins, and they're done! If anything, Linux companies should be suing MS to audit the MS source code to check against infringement upon GPL work, which, if you read the GPL, if you use GPL code, you the code HAS TO STAY OPEN SOURCE. Unless there are little code modules from Windows hiding in MSDN, MS has a high probability of having BROKEN THE SAME LAWS THEY ARE WHINING ABOUT.
It's easy. When you order over the phone, it's using the dial tones to complete an online order form. When WalMart orders more toliet paper because they're stock's low, they complete an online order form. Almost every system uses an over-the-web system for easy access to global databases. It's a really nice system. Executives can instantly see how many items were sold today, and can see the state of their company globally very rapidly. However, since it is over the internet, it is subject to hacking. So, the only real way is to either make like DARPA net, and have an entire, closed-circut system (expensive) or kill all the hackers. However, it's very hard to find hackers, so, it looks like we're just going to have to deal with them for the time being. However, I think that hacking is a trend that's slowly going away, simply because some of them are getting caught and sued for more than they could ever possibly pay. It's looking up, but not that far up.
So next time you want to call in instead of ordering online, don't bother. Even if you're talking to a human, chances are he's on the same site you were on before you decided to call entering your information in for you. It doesn't afford you that much more security. The only positive thing I can think of is that he's behind a massive, $10,000.00 firewall made by 3com for large corporate defense. Otherwise... just make sure the address says https: instead of http:
Slashdot Mirror
Has there ever really been a "civil" case?Barad Dûr, Mordor
It's not Bill Gates anymore. It's Steve Ballmer. I think the EU is too scared to bite MS because they're afraid of Ballmer's amazing chair-chucking powers.
Hey, my ISP is saying that your site is blocked! How can that be?
maybe that's why Microsoft is having so much trouble with OSS... they don't know what it is
Help! The school firewall blocks all traffic from sco.com!
That's interesting. When I dual-booted, I was on Linux 100% and Windows 0%. I booted Windows 3 times to fix filesystem errors on the NTFS partition (I didn't know how the fsck command worked back then) and then after 3 months I killed Windows 'cause I hadn't used it. Been using Kubuntu ever since. Okay, so I tried Gentoo, then Fedora, and now I'm back on Kubuntu. I just found that OpenOffice did everything I needed. I use GMail, so that goes with me everywhere.
In addition, the skills I've learned using Linux have allowed me to use my hosting company's services with greater effect. It's so enabling to be able to log in via SSH and make a post-commit script to slap the latest documentation onto the web directory for every new build. The Windows "easy equivalent" involves Visual Source Safe (sticker price $500 or so, per seat) and IIS 6.0 (which is a much more expensive server, almost $200/month for the same kind of bandwidth/storage I get now under a Linux VPS) and a FTP client and the "copy paste" technique AFTER locating the latest build in the gigantic and cryptic VSS repository (which is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, what with all the files named things like AAAAAAAAAAAB.AAAAAAAAAAA and crap).
What's more, I've never paid a single penny for Linux. I've tried the free trial of SuSE SLED 10.1 and it's NOT the solution for the future (trust me...) however, Linux itself is. Moving to Linux with either Ubuntu/Kubuntu is the easiest thing there is, and it will save you a lot of money. It will also save you a lot of time. My VSS vs. Subversion example is only one recent event. I have had many kinds of similar experiences with Linux.
The only reason for not upgrading to Linux is fear of the painful times when you're thunking around in between Windows and Linux. It's like jumping into the pool: it's really painful up to the gonads, but after that acclimation it's all smooth-sailing.
That's precisely what free will is all about. God is giving you the chance to screw yourself, only he won't sneer and say "I told you so." when you're at the pearly gates and your name's not on the list.
/.) but go find youself a CS Lewis and debate with him.
Religion is addicting: if you get deep enough into it and exercise a little faith, there's always an answer for everything.
Face it: you're fighting an establishment several thousand years older than you. Defeating you in a theological debate would be like sandblasting a sodacracker. I'm not saying I'm qualified to do so, but a competent scriptorian could. I'm no modal Christian (hello! I read
You'll loose every time.
Trust me....
You've obviously never used PHP. I can code something quick and dirty in Java in no time. But I'll spend twice the time, twice the effort, and twice the thought for the web based crap because:
You've got to plug it into HTML. A pain.
You've got to secure it. If you're not paranoid about your PHP scripting, a script kiddie WILL hack you and WILL rape your network.
Who said anything about a war of guns and missiles?
I'm talking about an ideological war. It destroys the intullectual peace to just have the dang war, and it rapes the peace to leave the terrorism there. Their terrorism is Islamic Fascists - trying to make the rest of the world convert to Islam. It's in their Fatwas. They're committed to FORCING their way of thinking upon others. They've already waged war against my way of thinking. Whether I recognize it or not, there is a war. Will I fight for what I beleive?
It's fine to have differing opinions, but when they become destructive it is a crime against humanity.
Or you could read a few pages out of the gigantic book "upgrading and repairing pc's" and build your own machine. That's what I did. My machine works just fine. PS: Your sig is sort of dumb. if(terror==peace) GenericHuman.this=null; else { } // do nothing
Excuse my Java, but your thinking is a bit flawed IMHO.
The people who get the canned response are themselves being counter-productive. They haven't bothered to read the list archives or do any of their own research on the subject, or they would already know that their suggestion is useless. These sorts of minds are not a useful resource to apply to the problem.
You know that in mailing lists it's generally considered rude if you speak when you have nothing to say? So you personally don't have the patience to explain to some newbie about the problem. Rather than maintaining silence and letting someone else help the person, you egotistically rebuke them. Honestly, it takes you more time to criticize them than it does to ignore it. Another way of learning more about something is making a suggestion and listening to feedback. Satirical, euphemistic feedback does not help.
I don't know where you got the impression that I'm unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. My original response in this thread was an (apparently misguided) effort to convince you that a humourous canned response is entirely appropriate for messages like the one which started the thread ("just make it legal to kill spammers and their families!"), and that doing so isn't in any way being a "part of the problem." I (and many others) would be quite willing to hear about new methods for combatting spam. You may be correct in saying I'm anarchistically unwilling to hear completely impractical and unworkable "solutions" which just cause more problems and don't do anything to actually address the issue.
I'm a programmer. You don't get far in programming that learning that your initial idea is nothing more than a starting point. True, the page is no longer blank, but you do have an eraser with which to make changes and modify the original idea. Your policy of just rejecting/ridiculing incepient solutions is counterproductive. The toughest problems only get closer to being solved the more times you approach them, and you're flat out refusing to come back and take another whack at it. More specifically, the Law does not install locks on doors to prevent theft, but provides punishments that deter potential theifs from comitting the crime. What you're saying is that you're unwilling to make a more effective law, and rather are only interested in building a better lock (a technical solution to spam, like a filter system). We need both.
I for one would much rather have 95% of my email time wasted by spam than to be mugged even 0.01% of the time. They're not even close to being on the same scale.
I agree with you there. However, seeing as how we have the mugging problem mostly under control, let's focus on the spam problem. They share the same abstract root. They simply manifest themselves differently.
But not all that effective. Ignoring the ethical and practical problems of the death penalty (false positives, anyone?), statistics have shown time and again that the threat of capital punishment doesn't reduce the rate of serious crimes by a significant amount compared to the threat of imprisonment. People commit crimes like these because either they're emotionally or mentally unstable, or because they believe they won't be caught.
You're missing the point. Those people you listed (the ones that are insane or think they won't get caught) are going to commit the crime no matter what law you have in place. It's the people that calcuate the risks of getting caught (ie. the cautious ones) that are more likely to commit the crime if there is a weak punishment. You can't do anything about the crazy people, but the strong punishment drives away the others. I wonder how many spammers keep spamming away because they know that the worst that will happen to them is a mere slap on the wrist. This would suggest two actions: 1) Stronger laws that punishes more severly the crime 2) Development of new ways to catch people commiting the crime One without the other is totally worthless. The OP suggested
Amatuer --> Professional
Don't squash the armchair philosopher himself (as you advocate), rather, squash his pride. Then he'll be able to help the problem. Unti then, you're not helping anyone other than your own self-gratification in ridiculing those you consider inferior to yourself.
Remember: never hurt the newbie, because they are the ones that will be the next master.
That people have created a system of ridiculing people searching for a solution tells me that we're getting further from a solution. It also makes me begin to suspect that the people making/using that list are spammers attempting to stomp all attempts to find a solution.
The response is mostly designed for cases where people see the same old "solutions" propose time and again by technically illiterate folk who think that they've found a simple and easy solution that all the experts have somehow missed. It converts something repetitive and tedious into something that's at least a little bit amusing.
Or in other words: the people that made that list are actively involved in trying to find ways to fight spam, and use it to stomp useless suggestions (which have all been suggested before) which either do nothing to address the problem or are completely impractical.
The would you mind helping these people? Simply ridiculing them is alienating a mind that is willing to work on the problem. It's extremely counter-productive.
Spam is a crime. It wastes other people's time and money. It's petty theft. It's no better than walking up to someone and mugging them.
I see your point! Surely if we can prevent people from mugging other people, we can prevent people from spamming others as well! Oh, wait... we can't even protect the physical safety of people from others who live in the same society and under the same code of laws as them.
Surely even you are aware of the statistics. Somewhere around 95% of all email sent is spam. Now, even in San Francisco you don't get mugged 95% of the time you walk out your door. Similarly, I don't think that 95% of my [email] time should be stolen. You have a perfectly valid point, though it doesn't stand the test of statistics. If spam were floating at somewhere around 40% or even 50%, you'd have a much more valid argument.
We need to either find a way of tracking them or find a way of screening them out. I'm open to solutions. I've spent considerable thought on the problem, and I don't have any ideas short of blacklisting (which isn't feasible.)
That's because it's a complex problem with no simple solution, just like many of the other problems we're currently unable to solve. You aware that many, many people are trying to find ways to eliminate or at least reduce the problem? And many of these people seem to be a good deal more intelligent than you, but haven't come up with a silver bullet.
It's unrealistic for you to expect me, or anyone, to have a solution. However, you're being anarchistically unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you're trying to be part of the problem.
But the internet's been doing a pretty good job so far at surviving.
I would beg to differ.
Your link contains a message from someone who's mail service was being overwhelmed by spam connections, and he improved his system so it's able to automatically block (at the network level) the major problems. It actually sounds like this problem resulted in him increasing the efficiency of his mail system.
Hardly a good example of spam "breaking the internet", or a demonstration that the internet isn't surviving.
Finally: the humorous canned response was a reply to someone who suggested we make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their families. It's nice that you're so serious about wanting to stop spam, but I don't think anyone expected a serious reply to that proposal.
Fear is an effective tool of management. If we used the death sentence more often, do you think crime would be comitted as often? To me it's a preventative measure. However, the only flaw I can find in that planis the tracking down the spammers part. They're devious and careful. They're hackers. They know how to imp
Whoosh. I even said it was satire in the very post you responded to.
That people have created a system of ridiculing people searching for a solution tells me that we're getting further from a solution. It also makes me begin to suspect that the people making/using that list are spammers attempting to stomp all attempts to find a solution. I don't find it satirical as much as I find it BS. Slightly amusing BS, but it's not welcome AFAIC. I want a solution, not excuses. Spam is a crime. It wastes other people's time and money. It's petty theft. It's no better than walking up to someone and mugging them. You're doing the same thing, anyways. They're loosing money paying (either directly or indirectly, either in their time or in the time of the people they either directly or indirectly employ) and time wasted in the totally bogus unsolicited spam. More and more of the spam I see (I'll read one or two every week or so just so I know more or less what I'm talking about) is a gigantic con. Phishing. It's nothing but miserable people who have nothing to offer society leeching off of society by preying on those that aren't looking out for the predators. It's low. It's horrible. It should be highly punishable. That doesn't help. We need to either find a way of tracking them or find a way of screening them out. I'm open to solutions. I've spent considerable thought on the problem, and I don't have any ideas short of blacklisting (which isn't feasible.) If SPAM breaks the internet, SPAM will die.
My brain fairly vibrates with the impact of such tremendous insight. But the internet's been doing a pretty good job so far at surviving. I would beg to differ. http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/2006-Decemb
Perhaps the makers of this list would care to put their clearly superior intellect towards solving the problem, rather than making fun of people who try to solve the problem? The best SPAM solution I've heard yet is rebuilding the whole email system from the ground up, integrating new message sender authenitcation techniques. However, this is rejected because it breaks existing systems which rely on automatically sent email. In addition, the system would be too easily abused (who decides what's legitimate email?). SPAM I think will eventually collapse upon itself. It's currently saturating the internet, making normal, legitimate traffic wait. I recently noticed that a fellow member of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group finally tweaked his email server enough to recieve something other than spam. He said he got about 3 months of backlogged legit email. If SPAM breaks the internet, SPAM will die. They have to find a limit at some point, and they also need to find a way to make money. I can't find anyone that says they've actually bought anything from spammers. Rather, I'm led to believe that they make almost all their money off of phishing. It's therefore my supposition that they keep up these massive bot nets and mass-spam tactics to keep us distracted from their real cash source: phishing. Remember: they don't necessarily need to get your credit card number. They can make a pretty penny simply selling your personal information (email, address, phone number, whatever) to other spammers. The phishing and PIM-harvesting is their big ticket item. I'm willing to speculate that there aren't any drugs in Canada. It's all a distraction.
I was using Windows XP Professional, the one that was supposed to be the most stable, the most secure, and the most usable. What did it do? It locked me out of my laptop. It drove the poor processor into the ground with useless processes running day and night. It drove that little processor further towards critical failure when it's insecurity allowed vicious spyware, adware, and other things to run on my laptop. I had to wait 2 years for the release of MS Anti-Spyware to rip out all that spyware. Where was Microsoft's "innovation" then? I'm a safe user, too! I use Firefox, and I don't go to any bad websites, I don't read spam email or open any unknown attachments, and I still got blasted with enough spyware to curse my first email address with enough spam to force my evacuation to a gmail account.
I have to reinstall Windows on my desktop machine once every 4 months or so to keep a stable platform. How come whenever I click on my network card in the network connections area of control panel the system does nothing? It did that in XP Pro, too. Is this an undocumented MS "innovation?"
When I removed an old hard drive, the OS decided it needed to reactivate Windows. I've had to reinstall the dang thing so many times that it decided I had a pirated copy, and LOCKED my activation key. A $35 support phone call later gets me a new key which will work once. When Windows commits suicide in another 3 months, I'll have to call MS again, pay another $35 and get another key for the same machine. Is this a "innovation?"
When I associated my
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but they can hire all the Ph.Ds in the world, and all the interns, too, but they're still far from being "innovative."
Take Vista, for example.
When I beta tested it, every time you did something that wasn't built for Vista, it spent 15 seconds disabling the Areo-glass theme and reverting to the 2D interface. When I exited, it spent about 30 seconds turning the 3D effects back on. I'm just going to assume that's an "innovation." Even if it is, I have to point out that my Fedora Core 6 laptop has the whole 3D desktop effect without any of those drawbacks right now. SuSE had Xgl in full release about six months before Vista (assuming it is still released in Jan. of '07). Also, Apple has had the whole 3D desktop thing going on since about 2001 with OS X. Forgive me for not finding MS very "innovative."
I suppose their greatest "innovation" was putting macro scripting into MS Office. That way you could write a malicious script which worked on Windows *and* OS X. That's innovative.
I suppose someone might have a solution to all these problems. However, the bulk of these problems happened in 2003, 2004, and early 2005. They're history. MS has irrevocably lost my trust. After the spam thing, I just don't know what else they could do. The only things they have left to do is murder my family, destroy my home, impugn my country, and preclude my hopes and dreams. At least they can't take my honor. Or maybe a new "innovation" will change that, too?
Umm... saying that M$ has the best IDE is like saying that they have the best way to skin a cat. There is no such thing as a "best" IDE. The qualifier for "best" IDE is a opinion. I like Eclipse for Java, KDevelop for C++, and I can't find anything to like about VS because I don't like manually searching through MSDN for 50 minutes out of every hour. I also find VS's indentation engine to be inherently broken for all I want out of it. For all it does, I think that Dev C++ is better. Does this mean Dev C++ is better than VS? No. It means I FIND it better. VS is not a one-stop-fixes-all IDE, and you talk like someone who's never used anything other than VS. I've personally tried Eclipse, Anjuta, KDevelop, NetBeans, Borland's JBuilder and C++Builder, VS C/C++/C#, Quanta+, Bluefish, Dreamweaver, Dev C++, and a handful of others that I can't think of off the top of my head. All this experience has taught me that it's a matter of preference. Shame on you for saying anything different.
M$ probably released the specs on the now document file they use because it isn't meant to be secretive. If you look carefully at it, it's really just a zip folder with some files in it. It's got a directory for images, and, IIRC, it has a metadata file and some other bit and pieces. It wouldn't be that hard to reverse-engineer it. The primary difficulty would be upgrading the renderer on the non-M$ veiwer to successfully view the document. It's got a lot of 3D effects and transparency/reflection effects in Office 2007. MS is probably hoping that no one will bother to make their renderer good enough to display those effects, which would persuade most users to keep Office 2007. It is clever, you have to give them that.
While I'm sure there are many other resources out there, I'm referring to the fact that Wikipedia in unique in that it is the single most centralized free resource of information. I remember to the days before Wikipedia, when the world was full of Yahoo! searches (Google was in its infancy) and how the net was composed of a few sparse resources which weren't very good. That was 1996-1999. Then Google came onto my radar and that made things easier. Then Wikipedia came and the net became a very usable thing. While the net would still be technically "usable" in the absence of Wikipedia, Wikipedia has created a expectation that would be sorely, sorely missed. The analogy is fairly accurate if you start to postulate the ramifications of depreciating the role of Wikipedia in your life. Try boycotting it for a week (a week in which you would have needed it) and see how you fare.
I love that there is so much stuff on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia at the library doesn't have hardly any of the things that people will need these days. Case study: I got called "leet." I had no idea what it meant, and the person wasn't doing a terribly bang-up job of explaining it. I wasn't sure whether to sue him for libel or to be deeply complimented. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out. Marvelous.
Wikipedia also has many valuable tidbits of information. Example: They have a wonderful article on Binary Trees, and more wonderful articles on how the Internet works, how the IP system came to be and how it works, and all kinds of stuff. You just don't find that stuff in the same level of detail in the Encyclopedia Americana. It's a wonderful public resource in that it opens up more information, more up-to-date information, and so much much more of it to *everyone.* You don't have to be able to get to a library if you just have a internet connection and a computer.
If Wikipedia ever went down, it would be like Google going down. The web would become almost unusable, and likewise the web would loose a terribly important resource in Wikipedia. Wikipedia also is so accurate that many other online encyclopedic services use Wiki articles as theirs or they use them as a base to build their own articles. I saw the same Wikipedia article on King Leopold the Third of Belgium mirrored on about nine different sites (only about three of which admitted that it was a Wikipedia article, curiously enough).
This isn't *software* they're patenting. This is like Random House Publishing patenting the Sentence. It's not legitimate. A doubly linked list is one of the most generic, abstract tools of programming. No patent, law, or principle could make me stop using them. They should be sued right now for this blunder. Hey, Microsoft, you've got lawyers, money, and time to blow... why don't you put them in their place?
Exactly. MS has patented the double-click, did you know that?
1) That's a idiotic patent. It's too ambiguious. If they patented the mouse, then they'd have some beef. However, then:
1.1) They'd have to sue people like Targus, Logitech, Saitek, Dell, Comp USA, and everyone else for making mice, which apparently infringe on MS IP.
1.2) We'd all switch to IBM's TrackPoint or a trackball, or a track pad, hell, or even use touch screens.
1.3) They can't do that. So, even if the court doesn't overturn that bogus patent, what do we do? Replace "double-click" with "dual-click" or "click twice." No big deal. Otherwise they'd be patenting the ability of MY finger to apply pressure to an object. I think God would have a few issues with MS infringing on His IP at that point.
2) I'm willing to bet that most of the MS patents are stupid things like that.
3) About the IP stack thing...
3.1) The IP stack was done before DOS, before Microsoft. Before Linux, even. It would be impossible to prove that the IP stack is a MS invention, because it isn't. If you want proof, go read Wikipedia. They've compiled an excellent history of the Internet and the IP protocol.
3.2) Stuff like HTTP, Telnet, etc. has been around as long as well.
3.3) With all this patent nonsense, this would probably trigger a movement to change the dates of software patenting. After 3 or four years the patents nullify and the technology passes into public domain. That's enough time for a company to make a profit off of a technology, no? If they didn't, it must have *really* sucked.
4) In order to prove that any code in any OSS is infringing on MS IP, MS would have to disclose their sources to the world for a candid comparison. MS isn't going to do that. They've jealously guarded their sources for years. I know from a friend that they have full-time hackers who's job is to maliciously destroy people who try to steal the code (they fried his computer somehow - he was using Windows, big surprise).
5) If MS wants to review the Linux code, we could just fax all the code over the Redmond...
6) I think it's infinitely more likely that MS blatantly stole and steals Open Source, GPL-ified material on a regular basis. How easy would it be for them? It's all open source, sitting out there in the open for them to ctrl+c and ctrl+v... Their sources will never be seen outside the company, so there's no way for them to get caught. All they have to do is mangle the binaries a bit so they're not comparable to the OS origins, and they're done! If anything, Linux companies should be suing MS to audit the MS source code to check against infringement upon GPL work, which, if you read the GPL, if you use GPL code, you the code HAS TO STAY OPEN SOURCE. Unless there are little code modules from Windows hiding in MSDN, MS has a high probability of having BROKEN THE SAME LAWS THEY ARE WHINING ABOUT.
Just my $0.02...
It's easy. When you order over the phone, it's using the dial tones to complete an online order form. When WalMart orders more toliet paper because they're stock's low, they complete an online order form. Almost every system uses an over-the-web system for easy access to global databases. It's a really nice system. Executives can instantly see how many items were sold today, and can see the state of their company globally very rapidly. However, since it is over the internet, it is subject to hacking. So, the only real way is to either make like DARPA net, and have an entire, closed-circut system (expensive) or kill all the hackers. However, it's very hard to find hackers, so, it looks like we're just going to have to deal with them for the time being. However, I think that hacking is a trend that's slowly going away, simply because some of them are getting caught and sued for more than they could ever possibly pay. It's looking up, but not that far up. So next time you want to call in instead of ordering online, don't bother. Even if you're talking to a human, chances are he's on the same site you were on before you decided to call entering your information in for you. It doesn't afford you that much more security. The only positive thing I can think of is that he's behind a massive, $10,000.00 firewall made by 3com for large corporate defense. Otherwise... just make sure the address says https: instead of http: